Art & Illustration at JBU
Make your mark
At JBU, you will develop both the conceptual and technical skills you need to create high-quality work. As you learn from experts in the field, you will build a marketable portfolio that exemplifies your versatility and range of abilities.
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Work in incredible facilities
Our three art buildings include two 3-story facilities featuring classrooms, a theater, two galleries, photo and cinema studios, MAC labs, and a printmaking workshop. Also new is an "art barn" with additional large spaces for a state-of-the-art photo studio, drawing and painting classrooms, wood shop, ceramics studio, and individual artist stations.
Tour the world
Every summer, JBU hosts a European Art Tour and one or more international summer studies trips. See world class art and see the world!
SEE OUR TRIPS
Display your creativity
Show off your work in the annual Student Works Show, a highlight in the JBU calendar. You can also reserve the student gallery for your personal exhibit.
Explore the art gallery
JBU’s art gallery, the second best in NWA, hosts a myriad of professional artists and their work, providing students direct contact with professionals in their field.
Integrate faith and art
At JBU, your faculty will encourage you to use your talents for the glory of God. In every class and every career, our desire is to honor Him.
Gain great exposure
Every year, seniors display their best work for potential employers at the JBU Portfolio Show, which draws a large group of recruiters as well as hundreds of friends and family.
Mingle with experts
Every year we bring in a variety of talented and well-known artists, photographers, and filmmakers from around the country to speak to our campus and conduct workshops for visual art students.
Meet our art and illustration professors
Bob Martin
Professor of Visual Arts
Bobby C. Martin is an artist/educator/facilitator who works out of his 7 Springs Studio near West Siloam Springs, Oklahoma. Mr. Martin’s artwork is exhibited and collected internationally. Mr. Martin is active in the contemporary Native American art world and his work has been featured in numerous group and solo exhibitions, the most recent being a one-person exhibition entitled But You Don’t Look Indian… at ArtVentures Gallery in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in 2018. As an independent curator, his most recent project was a national touring exhibition, Return from Exile: Contemporary Southeastern Indian Art, which was on display at various venues throughout the United States from 2015-2018. Mr. Martin’s work is exhibited in numerous museum collections, including the Philbrook Museum and Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, the Museum of the Great Plains in Lincoln, Nebraska, and the Sam Noble Museum in Norman, Oklahoma.
An enrolled citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) tribe, he currently holds a Professor of Visual Arts position at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, where he teaches printmaking and other studio art courses. He frequently leads printmaking workshops and artist retreats at his studio and at various museums and art centers in the mid-west.
Erin Shaw
Assistant Professor of Visual Arts
Erin Shaw is a painter of borderlands, the spaces between worlds. As a visual storyteller, the child of an Oklahoma farm, Shaw tills the rich soil of dichotomy through her masterful uses of color, iconography, and story. As a Chickasaw-Choctaw artist, she creates in a state of tension, suspended between two worlds where both solemnity and humor pervade her art. She finds that truths are revealed in unanticipated ways, and trickster often appears throughout her work. The artist earned her BFA in studio art from Baylor University and her MFA from the University of Oklahoma. She is Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, AR, an international speaker, and a featured artist in Visual Voices: Contemporary Chickasaw Art, among other exhibits in the U.S.
Peter Pohle
Professor of Visual Arts
Mr. Peter Pohle grew up in Berlin, Germany where he received his initial art training as an apprentice in the largest printing house in Berlin. He earned a B.A. equivalent degree in Visual Communication at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. He worked for nine years as an artist in the media department of Campus Crusade for Christ in Germany where he met his wife, Becky. Peter and Becky Pohle have three daughters.
Since 1997, the Pohle's have been living in the United States, where Mr. Pohle worked as a freelance illustrator, fine artist in oil painting, and full-time staff designer for Dayspring Cards and Hallmark Cards.
Mr. Pohle has extended experience in the traditional as well as digital art. He enjoys the range of working on the computer modeling in 3D or illustrating in Photoshop. In his free time and during summer break, he works in traditional media with oils and oil pastel. View his portfolio at steambirddesign.com
Commercial product designer
You could design greeting cards, stationery, calendars, and textiles that are sold around the world.
Fashion illustrator
Create aesthetically appealing layouts for fashion magazines, departments stores, catalogs, and independent designers.
Children's book illustrator
There are countless children’s books in the making that could use creative and fun illustrations. You could work for a publishing house or as a freelancer in this field.
Animation studios
Create unique 3D models of characters and settings for animated projects.
Advertising agencies
There are plenty of opportunities to develop brands and labels at advertising agencies that communicate the functionality of a product and increase sales.
Freelance work
If you don’t want to do just one type of illustration, build a portfolio and a clientele. This a great way to use your skills and fulfill your passion with a variety of projects.
